


Cry Me a River

by hopelessbookgeek



Series: Gold-Lie Promises [7]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Baby's first heist, Female Jack, GTA AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 05:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11052462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelessbookgeek/pseuds/hopelessbookgeek
Summary: Ray's not totally sure he's ready for this heist thing, but he gets in a little too deep a little too fast. What do you get when you cross an anxiety disorder with first degree murder?





	Cry Me a River

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! There's probably only going to be one more part in this series and then it's over! Thanks for bearing with me, I know it's been a while between updates.

Ray groaned when he heard the knock at the door. He’d _just_ settled into the comfiest spot in his worn-out couch, thinking he still had twenty minutes til Domino’s showed up. They’d really upped their game. Well, and he placed the same order every week for the past year. They probably prepared it in advance now.

He was _not_ yet at the level of comfort with the Domino’s guy to call at him to just come in– wasn’t that how the weirdest pornos started?– so he grabbed a twenty out of his wallet and pulled the door open.

Well, not Domino’s, unless their deliverymen had really started classing it up. The guy at the door was probably about forty, on the chubby side with a waxed mustache and a nice tux. “You’re not my pizza guy,” Ray said, stupidly. “Michael’s not here.”

“I’m not looking for Michael. You’re Ray, right?”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “It’s a bad sign that you know my name, I figure.”

“Could be,” the guy said with an understanding look. He pulled a somewhat crumpled envelope out of his pocket and passed it to Ray. “I’m Geoff. I think we might be coworkers soon.”

“Maybe.” He saw the V on the envelope where a stamp would be, his name in elegant lettering across the front, and could guess it was bad news. Or, rather, it was news; he wasn’t sure how he felt about it yet. He liked the idea of bloody justice, of holding corruption tight in his fist like an overripe tomato, paving the path to a better world with a rap sheet a mile long… but that was all in _theory_. In practice he’d never even held a gun, never been in a fight, never killed a man, and never shook hands with a madman. The man the city of Los Santos called only Vagabond wasn’t in the room, had probably never been in a room with Ray, but he felt a vague sense of unease anyway. “Is there, like… anthrax in here?”

“Fuckin’ better not be, dude, I held that thing since yesterday.”

He wondered if Geoff was going to leave, but it didn’t look like it, so he went back to the couch and let Geoff come in and close the door. He tore the envelope open. Inside was a card, but not like Hallmark from that aisle in CVS, more like a wedding invitation, thick creamy paper with carefully inked words. “What the fuck does this mean?”

Geoff stood behind him and read over his shoulder. It was letters, to be sure, but they didn’t seem to form _words_ … it was like a code. “187 E M, 0800 Sun,” Geoff read aloud.

“I can’t read this! I can barely read! What’s fucking… 0800? Isn’t that something they say in war movies?”

“Military time,” Geoff said with a nod. “Eight AM on Sunday. Any chance it means 187 East Main Street?”

“I don’t know! You tell me!”

“Let me…” He pulled out his phone and typed it into Google Maps. “187 East Main Street is an ammunition place. Definitely plausible. I think this might be a list of instructions, they all have times next to them. And that last one, at 1530, that’s the Va– that’s the boss’s place.”

“How do you know?”

“I was just there yesterday!”

“Alright.” Ray looked over the card and then stuck it in his sweatshirt pocket. “I’m waiting for a pizza delivery, so I’ll, uh, see you around, I guess.”

Geoff took the hint pretty well. “See you around. Good luck tomorrow on… whatever that is.”

When he was gone, Ray tipped his head back and sighed. He had to buy _ammo?_ He couldn’t even spell ammunition. As for everything else on the list… Assuming they were addresses, he Googled them and got a mask store on the pier, a mechanic downtown, and one of the eight billion convenience stores that, in this city, existed basically as ATMs for anyone who thinks they can get to their gun faster than the cashier can. All in all, it looked uncomfortably like a not-so-detailed instruction sheet on committing a burglary, like a low-scale one-man heist.

Chances were his place in this… gang… depended on his adherence to these instructions. Would he? Wouldn’t he? The arrival of Domino’s broke through the hesitancy and that ended that for the day. He shouldn’t do it, he figured when he was in bed that night. He couldn’t risk it. But he set his alarm early enough that he could catch a cab to East Main Street anyway.

At the ammo store, everything kicked into high gear. A rough-and-tumble woman behind the counter showed him the way around a sniper rifle and told him the gun and ammo were paid for already by a _friend_. At the mask store, again payment was made in advance. He picked up a lacquer owl mask and took that with him. The mechanic he had to tell he didn’t own a car and couldn’t even drive, but promised to stop by if he ever acquired one. He carried everything in a big backpack and prayed no one would try to steal it.

Outside the convenience store he quite literally bumped into a surly-looking redhead. “Oh. Sorry, ma’am.”

“You’re Ray, right?” God, bad news times two. “I think you and I are in this together.”

“Great. Cool. I’m having an awesome time so far.”

“You will,” she said with such conviction that he couldn’t think of a snarky comeback. “What’re you in this for?”

He tried to answer-without-answering. Michael was getting good at that these days, saying exactly where he was going and what he was doing without actually saying anything at all. Ray figured he was ashamed of some new girlfriend. Eventually he’d get sloppy or lazy and Ray would meet her. It had happened before. “I have to walk the long way home from work now,” he said slowly, “and the people who should’ve had my back just stuck a knife in it.”

The woman nodded. “So it’s like that. Listen. You got everything you need?”

“S-sure, I guess. Everything I was supposed to get.”

“Rooftop across the street. Get up there, mask on, get _ready_. You know what I mean?” Her eyes were very blue, very soft compared to the deep huskiness of her voice.

“Yeah– yeah, I think I got it.” Get his gun out, right? He was a sniper now. He was going to cover her while she robbed the store, and he had never shot a gun. Maybe this was a setup, but maybe it wasn’t. He wasn’t ready for prison, but he’d probably die before anything too bad happened anyway.

He did what she told him. He always did what he was told. He climbed the rooftop and took a second to enjoy the view; it was only second-story in a city of skyscrapers, but there was something kinda nice about just being a little taller than the rest of the world. Up here, he could breathe.

He assembled the gun the way the ammo lady had shown him; it took him too long, he fumbled every piece, but it wasn’t complicated and he had a good memory and clever hands and he could load it. When he was in position he stuck the mask on, just in case anyone was looking at him. And kinda because it would be cool to look like an owl.

He couldn’t see into the store, but he did notice when the redheaded woman came out. She snuck around the back of the store and he heard the telltale roar of a bike vanishing into the distance, and then he was alone, feeling pretty damn stupid. A single cop, on foot, started poking around the store, but he didn’t seem to be having much luck figuring anything out, or maybe he didn’t care enough to try.

But then he looked up across the street and looked Ray dead in the eye, and sure he was wearing the dumb owl mask but he panicked and pulled the trigger and then suddenly the cop was facedown on the pavement with an exit wound the size of his palm on the back of his head.

Ray leapt back and immediately went about dissembling the gun. He could not stay here, not with the cop dead and down, and fuck, should he see if he was okay? Should he… call an ambulance? What do you get when you cross an anxiety disorder with first degree murder?

The Vagabond wasn’t even home. Figures. There was another envelope with his name on it stuck to the door with a knife. Inside was five hundred bucks and another creamy card, beautiful calligraphy spelling out three words in a large font:

_In too deep._


End file.
